Comedy Legend Jerry Lewis Dies at 91

Updated Monday 21 August 2017
10:17

Legend Comedian, Jerry Lewis, the high prince of low-brow comedy on stage and in film as well as a fund-raising powerhouse with his annual Labour Day telethon, died on Sunday at the age of 91, his family confirms.

Lewis died of natural causes at his home in Las Vegas on Sunday morning with his family by his side, the family said in a statement.

He had been hospitalized for about five weeks beginning in early June for a urinary tract infection, keeping him from traveling to Toronto to appear in a film, his spokesperson, Candi Cazau, told Reuters by telephone.

Lewis rose to fame as the goofy foil to suave partner Dean Martin. At home, he was both loved and derided, while in France, he became a comic icon.

He once summed up his career by saying "I've had great success being a total idiot" and said the key was maintaining a certain child-like quality.

"I look at the world through a child's eyes because I'm 9," he told Reuters in a November 2002 interview. "I stayed that way. I made a career out of it. It's a wonderful place to be."

Jim Carrey, an actor whose style owed a heavy debt to Lewis, paid tribute to the comedian soon after news of his death.

"That fool was no dummy," Carrey wrote. "Jerry Lewis was an undeniable genius an unfathomable blessing, comedy's absolute! I am because he was!"

Lewis was 87 when his last movie, Max Rose, came out in 2013, playing a jazz pianist who questions his marriage after learning his wife of 65 years may have been unfaithful.

The son of vaudeville entertainers, Lewis became a star in the early 1950s as Martin's comic sidekick in nightclubs, on television and in 16 movies. At their height, they set off the kind of fan hysteria that once surrounded Frank Sinatra and the Beatles.

Their decade-long partnership ended with a bitter split and Lewis went on to star in his own film comedies.

Lewis' movie persona, like the character he created in the act with Martin, varied little from film to film. He was zany and manic, forever squealing, grimacing and flailing his way through situations beyond his control.

He starred in more than 45 films in a career spanning five decades. His cross-eyed antics often drew scorn from critics but he was for a time a box-office hit who commanded one of the biggest salaries in Hollywood.

The White House said Lewis had kept people laughing for more than a half-century and praised him as one of the greatest entertainers and humanitarians.

"Jerry lived the American Dream - he truly loved his country, and his country loved him," said the statement from President Donald Trump's press secretary.

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